Okay, before you read any of this, realize that Mid-Ohio-Con is, hands down, my favorite show. There’s none better on the planet.

Having said that, Mid-Ohio-Con 2004 was my worst weekend ever.

It’s not the show’s fault, believe me. A bunch of circumstances and people conspired against me to kick me in the teeth repeatedly. The fact that I had what good times I did are a testament to the show. As I told show promoter and con daddy Roger Price, “Except for the parts that sucked, it was a great show.”

What sucked?

Well, first off, last year at MOC I had met this girl. She dumped me over the summer and I still had a thing for her. In fact, meeting her went so well that there will never be a Mid-Ohio-Con 2003 report. It’d all be about her, and I don’t really want to write that one.

(If you’re interested, though, I did write a sitcom loosely based on our meeting for a contest for Bravo. You can download it at Wowio.)

So, a good chunk of the show had those bittersweet post-traumatic flashbacks like “That’s where we first kissed” and things like that.

But okay, I can get past that. Besides, Clare Kramer (Glory from “Buffy) was going to be there, and she’s the type of woman to make you forget all the rest... and how to form complete sentences... and your name.

Then there was the Program Book. The Program Book is to Mid-Ohio-Con as the Post Office is to the U.S. Government. One works for the other, but they’re largely independent. I say this so that when I tell you “This was the first Mid-Ohio-Con program book to turn a healthy profit” you will understand everything that happened.

The Program Book has been my responsibility for about four years now. I think it’s one of the best looking and most helpful programs out there. It’s easy to read, and this year was going to have a special Small Press section where, well, small press people could get some decent exposure. As my book, Raider, is small press, I try to help my brethren out.

And Southwest Printers, a fine, fine printer in Las Vegas prints the books. Southwest’s prices are so good that, even with shipping, they beat me getting them printed locally. Plus they produce a quality product. They’d done the 2003 Program Book, which looked great. And they’d worked with me on this particularly difficult and deadline-intensive issue.

This year, right before I left for the show on Friday, I checked the tracking on the packages. The Brown-ish colored site told me the books were right on time... to be delivered on Monday.

All of Timberlake heard that scream.

I called UP the shipper, whose name I will withhold for a variety of reasons. You’re smart, you know who it is.

As I drove down to Columbus, I called them and talked to their customer disservice people. You see, the package tracking told me where the package was. I didn’t know where that shipping center was, per se, and I’m no geography major, but Columbus is in the center of the state. I would be, when I arrived in Columbus around 1:00pm, two hours from anywhere in Ohio.

So, I figured, how hard would it be to pick them up directly at a shipping center?

Turns out, absolutely impossible.

Three separate people on the phone were of no help whatsoever. They didn’t express any concern over my predicament. There are Vulcans who are more sympathetic. None of them could, or would help, suggest anything, or even bother to see if there was something to do.

My printer, upon being apprised of the situation, called them to see “what they could do” for us. So we were working both ends. Well, not working exactly, since as I learned in physics class, working involved moving something through a distance, and we got nothing moved.

As I was driving down, I realized that I had left my brand-new Raider buttons at home. These spiffy little black and blue band buttons with the Raider shuriken logo were to be giveaways at the table. Now, I could have turned around and gotten them, but I was already an hour away and I wanted to be in Columbus as soon as I could do deal with the program book situation.

But I called my Dad and had him FedEx them down for Saturday delivery. I’d get them a couple hours after the show started, but I could deal with that.

But (you guessed it) the buttons never showed up. Some FedEx, hopefully former FedEx, employee didn’t bother to mark “Saturday Delivery” and they would arrive on Monday. After the show.

At the Laughing Ogre party I managed to be introduced to a comic book artist/Oops employee, whose name I am also withholding lest he get in trouble for actually trying to be helpful. Saturday night, he managed to find the books were at a ship center twenty minutes from the convention. He, and his boss, were very helpful but neither could get me the books. They were willing to sit on a feeder truck with me to look through over a thousand packages to find them, but they didn’t have the access they needed.

Please note, the books could be found. The shipping company and their employees told me they couldn’t. They told me they couldn’t stop a package in transit, yet the books were stationary and could be found.

So, no Program Books. All the advertisers were refunded, and my profit was gone. Soutwest refunded me the money for the books, thankfully. All the advertisers were very understanding, many of them being in the same business, and will hopefully return next year

You can click here, though, and download a PDF of the program book.

You’d think that’d be it. But I went out with buddy Paul Storrie, Larry (The Soup Nazi from “Seinfeld”) Thomas and a bunch of other people. Either there was something wrong with the food, or I had too many Smithwicks, (and honestly, I don’t think it was that) but the next morning, I was pretty sick. On the upside, the Callista Flockhart diet plan did keep me from gaining any weight that weekend, but still, not the way you want to do it.

So I got home, and there was a package from That Girl I mentioned before. I’d try to get in touch with her in September, trying to see if there might still be anything there. Nothing desperate, and very-good natured. In my mail was a pair of sweats and a socks that I had left behind, and a pretty cold note that said “I’ve moved on.” Some other stuff, too, but that’s not important right now.

Why she even held onto those clothes, I dunno. I didn’t even know I had left them behind.

Now thouroughly beaten down by the weekend, I went to my VCR to watch my tape of “Desperate Housewives” from the weekend which, as you’ve already guessed, didn’t record.

Now, did anything good happen?

Sure, I met a bunch of friends. I got to meet Clare Kramer, Steve Bacic, Noel Neill and Larry Thomas. I got to host a couple of panels, and there are some people who seem to like my hosting skills. (Stay tuned for more announcements on that for next year.) I was the lovely spokesmodel/co-host for the popular Comic Book Squares. And I sold and got the word out about “Raider: A Cold Day in Heaven,” the second Raider graphic novel.

And I did get to appear on TV with Larry Thomas. We were doing a local Columbus TV remote, and I was on camera drawing a caricature of Larry as a newscaster saying "No news for you!"

Like I said, great except for the parts that didn’t suck.

I figure next year has to be better, unless its far worse. So come out to Mid-Ohio-Con 2005! It’ll either be a spectacularly great time, as the wheel finally turns, or a flaming car wreck for me... and those are always interesting to watch, right?